The Apartment

Well, beezwaxes asked me to post about the apartment in Germany that I referred to here.

This is a personal experience. A lot of what I will write may have a logical explanation. I'm not looking for debate, but you may if you want. I am simply sharing the experience with anyone willing to read.

This happened in Fulda, West Germany, on a Thursday night, before the weekend of the fall of the Berlin Wall. So we're talking mid-November, 1989. Czechoslovakia had just opened it's borders up two weeks prior. I was stationed with the 1/11 Armored Cavalry from late '87-late '89.

A friend of mine, in my platoon, had a local girlfriend, and invited me over to her family apartment for the evening. Mainly it was for the oujia board thing. The girl, 18, had lived in the apartment all of her life, and told me her grandparents had died there. It wasn't an apartment like most people in the USA would envision. Think of a small apartment building, and half of the entire floor was the apartment. So it's laid out with some decent square footage, more like a small house. It was also on the third or fourth floor, I can't quite remember. It may be how apartments in downtown areas are, I'm not sure. Anyway, she also told me that someone had killed their self in her bedroom. She had a typical teenager's bedroom, for the time. Bon Jovi posters and such on the walls. She didn't have a door on the frame leading to her room, but rather she had the beads, I'm sure you're familiar with. They hang in place, down to the floor, it provides some privacy. Well, this was November in Germany, so it was quite cold outside. The heating for the apartment were these floor radiators, that ran along the perimeter of one wall. I assume steam ran through these.

You could walk into her room, and there was a definite drop in temperature. At least 10 plus degrees. This I experienced first hand. I actually touched the radiator to see if it was generating any heat, and it was. Like a radiator should, you couldn't keep your finger on it for any sustained time length.

Here are other things I experienced that night:

While playing my acoustic guitar, there was a thumping on the floor. It could've been the neighbor downstairs, but I fairly sure I wasn't that loud. Plus you couldn't pin point the spot of the thumping. It was as if the entire floor was thumping.

A banging on the window from outside the living room at 3or 4 floors up. (that one scared the crap out of me as I was trying to sleep and having a hard time at it, anyway)


Things I was told that had happened there:

Her posters sliding down, one by one, off of the walls of her room. One poster of a Porsche actually slid down behind a love seat. When they pulled the seat out to get to the poster, it appeared to have been sliced into 7 random pieces, as if by a razor blade.

See's her grandmother walking in the hallway on many occasions.

Anyway, that's my story.

Any questions, I will do my best to answer, but as I said, I'm just sharing an experience.